Hello world!

Introduction

If you are a programmer or just an enthusiast of the internet, you have probably heard or seen this sentence before, “Hello World!”. Sometimes it may be in lowercase, or have a comma, nevertheless, it is always referenced in coding, websites, etc. So, what exactly does “hello world” mean, why is it used, its origins, and how can you write it.

What does it mean

Hello world is a common sentence used by various programmers (beginner to professional) around the world when learning a new language or debugging. Normally, beginner programmers are taught this sentence to get a taste of what it feels to program in a certain language.

Why is it used

As mentioned before, hello world is used to debug and learn a new language. The rookie application of hello world is pretty obvious, as it is just to get the feeling of coding, however, hello world is applicable in expert scenarios too. For example, when a programmer is setting up a new environment, they may want to verify everything works out by making the computer write hello world.

Origins

So, how did this long-running tradition among programmers begin? Well, not much is known about its surge, but it is hypothesized that it originated from A Tutorial Introduction to the Language B, a book written by Brian Kernighan in 1972. In one of the examples on how to print an external variable, the author decides to print “hello, world!”.

Even though it was used in Kernighan’s book, it still didn’t get famous until, in 1974, it was used in a memo by Kernighan himself in Bell Laboratories and the book The C Programming Language in 1978. In the book, “hello, world” is used in an example, almost like in Kernigham’s book except it didn’t have an exclamation mark.

With all things considered, there’s not that much that we know about that indicates the exact origin of hello world. The origins of hello world may be unclear, but it is clear that it will keep being passed down from the old to new generations of programming as it has been from way back in the late 1970s to the modern 2020s. Goodbye, world!

How can you write it

Java

class HelloWorld {
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println(“Hello, world!”);
}
}

C#

Console.Writeline(“Hello, world!”);

Python

print(“Hello, world!”)

JavaScript

console.log(“Hello, world!”);

Ruby

puts “Hello, world!”

Lisp

(princ “Hello, world!”)